Days later, Congress invites Jose Canseco, Jason Giambi, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Frank Thomas, Rafael Palmeiro, and Curt Schilling, as well as Donald Fehr, Bud Selig, and Rob Manfred, to appear for a panel discussion on steroids and baseball. The parents of suicide victims Taylor Hooton and Rob Garibaldi, and another Crusader, Gary Wadler, are invited to testify as well. The hearing is set for March 17.
Baseball’s initial response is flippant. Only Jose Canseco agrees to testify. The rest of the players treat the invitation from Congress as if it were an optional photo shoot. Rafael Palmeiro is particularly condescending. “March 17 is my wife’s birthday, so you can guess my answer,” he says. Sammy Sosa sounds as if he’s being asked to speak at a Boys Club banquet. “I don’t know,” he says. “I have to talk to my agent.” Jason Giambi is the same way: “I haven’t decided,” a sentiment echoed by Mark McGwire. Frank Thomas, one of the Chicago White Sox who refused to take a steroid test in 2003 as a form of civil disobedience to force stronger testing the following year, calls the invitation “an honor.” At the commissioner’s office, the leadership is hostile. Bud Selig says he will not testify. For Congress, the score is a losing one. A week after invitations had been sent, Canseco and Thomas are the only players who have agreed to appear, while Donald Fehr and Rob Manfred say they will testify in representing the union and commissioner’s office, respectively.
Embarrassed and angry, Davis and Waxman use the full power of the federal government to counter baseball. They issue subpoenas for the players to appear. They subpoena baseball’s records, including Bud Selig’s newest jewel, the revised drug policy. They subpoena the drug tests of 2004. Baseball is furious. Rob Manfred and Stanley Brand, baseball’s attorneys, say Congress’s demand for their appearance rivals Iran-Contra in terms of jurisdictional inappropriateness.
Five days before the hearings, the New York Daily News reports that an FBI informant sold Mark McGwire anabolic steroids in the early 1990s. Over two days, the News articles are so detailed that they reveal the exact dosages of steroid combinations McGwire allegedly took three days per week:
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—The recipe called for ½ cc of testosterone cypionate every three days; one cc of testosterone enanthate per week; equipoise and winstrol v, ¼ cc every three days, injected into the buttocks, one in one cheek, one in the other.
It was the cocktail of a hardcore steroids user, and it is one of the “arrays,” or steroid recipes, Mark McGwire used to become the biggest thing in baseball in the 1990s, sources have told the Daily News.
They also detail the communications between the FBI and baseball, which baseball also said did not occur. Two days after the News stories appear, Bud Selig reverses course. He will testify after all.
DEEP IN the bunker lurk Don Fehr and Gene Orza. On the advice of their public relations firm, they do not respond publicly during the first weeks of the spring except for a terse statement for 60 Minutes. It was through clenched teeth that the union had agreed to reopen the collective-bargaining agreement. Despite the public pressure brought on by the Canseco and Caminiti allegations, the San Francisco Chronicle’s brilliant reporting, Congress, and even the steroid policy it acceded to, the union remains the one element of the baseball establishment that does not feel that the drug scandal deserves the type of emergency management and revision that has engulfed baseball. Two brilliant lawyers, Fehr and Orza do not hide their disdain for the discussion. They are always consistent. The writers might look back on the decade with recriminations and the league might have adopted a crusading tone now that John McCain is breathing down Bud Selig’s neck, but the union holds firm. They are good at that.
They point to the numbers for their vindication. With steroid testing in place, the numbers were supposed to drop, yet they increased. In the National League, players hit more home runs in 2004 than in 2002 by nearly 10 percent. Slugging percentage, doubles, batting average, on-base percentage, runs per game, virtually every offensive indicator increased in the first two years of drug testing. In the American League, runs per game rose from 4.81 in 2002, the last year without steroid testing, to 4.86 in 2003, to 5.01 in 2004, a modest increase of 4 percent. In 2004, there were 141 more home runs hit in the American League than in 2002.
Through it all, from Sosa-McGwire to Congress, Fehr and Orza never believed steroids to be the scourge they were made out to be. They still don’t. Gene Orza calls the 2003 test results proof that those convinced of a steroid epidemic were grossly uninformed. “I did know,” Orza says, as if he had swallowed a canary, “that the claims that put the pressures on the players to address this issue were wildly inflated.” Don Fehr is equally sardonic. “If steroids were the cause of everything,” he says, “then why were more home runs hit with a drug policy in place than before? You know what? Maybe things are just a little more complicated.”
In a sense, Fehr and Orza are correct. There simply is not enough research available for even the most gifted endocrinologists to unequivocally state what effect anabolic substances will have on the body in the great majority of cases. Yet the issue has evolved from a question of science to one of accountability, image, and perception, and the perception is that the Players Association does not see steroid use as a critical issue, either in the eyes of the public or in reality. This disconnect represents the players’ central problem, for, like Bud Selig, they cannot have it both ways. Are the players led by that silent majority who see steroids as a threat to their livelihoods or are they obstructing the league’s pursuit of a real policy, as Rob Manfred and Bud Selig believed? The prevailing view, to the annoyance of union veterans, is the latter.
Rich Melloni, the Crusader whose mission is to ensure that all young - people are aware of what these substances do to the mind as well as to the muscles, knows for a fact that the brain is affected by steroid use, possibly irreversibly, and especially in the young. Young adults, who are still producing maximum to near-maximum hormone levels, are clearly endangering themselves by using steroids or human growth hormone. Melloni’s experiments with the Syrian hamsters proved that. Yet nothing is exact. Parts of the hamster brain may be similar to those of the human brain, but there has been no actual steroid research performed on human beings. The potential effects of anabolic substances on a thirty-five-year-old man remain unclear. To a certain degree, the lack of research, which means a lack of consensus in the medical community, undermines what the Crusaders can say definitively about the long-term health effects of steroids. Thus, it remains possible that a big league player could use legal anabolic substances, such as human growth hormone, and suffer no currently known long-term consequences. Melloni often laments that the National Institutes of Health has yet to allocate the type of resources necessary for people like him to do the research, and thus close this loophole of uncertainty.
This lack of science emboldens Fehr and Orza’s position. From a medical standpoint, their conclusions are not markedly different from those of Jose Canseco. The union has never been particularly comfortable with the idea that even the best medical minds can’t agree, not only on the real effects of these drugs, but also on where the lines should be drawn between what is acceptable and what is not. To Gene Orza, who echoes Marvin Miller’s stance that enough information does not exist, maybe their cigarette defense isn’t so silly after all. To the union leadership, everything seems just a bit premature.
To John Hoberman this is clearly union subterfuge, which has distracted Fehr and the union from the central issue, which is enforcement. “Don Fehr seems to have a real talent for asking the right questions in the wrong way. The fact that there is no perfect, absolutely consistent definition of doping is less important than the fact that you have to draw certain lines just to proceed,” Hoberman said. “What’s wrong about the way that he poses that question is that it is not an honest question. It is not a straightforward question. It is a rhetorical one that is suggesting its own answer. The answer that it’s suggesting is a nihilistic one, that you can’t do anythin
g. There’s no basis for action because there’s no basis for definition. That to me is either an ignorant or intellectually dishonest one.”
Something odd is happening. For the first time in decades, the players’ union seems to be losing the public. For the union, facing rousing criticism is an unfamiliar position. For years, the union had been on the right side of virtually every issue. In their glory days, they liberated the players and created the most powerful union on earth. They were the envy of every sports union in the universe. They made sure the players received the best working conditions of any professional athletes playing American professional sports. They made the players equal partners of a billion-dollar business that, only a generation earlier, had reveled in cheating the players out of their fair share. They have done so much right by the players that it is jarring to see the union painted as obstructionist, and worse, out of touch both with its membership and with current public opinion.
“It was clear that first Miller and then Fehr-Orza were right about almost everything,” says Bob Costas. “Miller’s role in history during the primary chunk of his career is a heroic role. He’s not only extremely capable and acutely intelligent and very, very honest in his own way, but he’s on the right side of all the issues. He not only benefited his constituency, but he benefited baseball. Now, Fehr-Orza pick up the torch and they are extraordinarily capable themselves, and also extremely honest. Now you can be honest and still be stubborn or unreasonable, but you don’t catch them in two-faced positions or lies or contradictions the way you routinely catch the owners. And so a whole generation of us pretty much grew up reading from the gospel according to Marvin Miller and analyzed almost everything through that prism, even as these circumstances changed significantly.”
To Costas, the balance of power has shifted, which means the old approaches demand overhaul. The union has clearly won, but with its immense power has begun to lose its moral influence because of its ideological approach to dealing with the owners. “In the early 1990s, this is what became clear to me: The owners are still screwed up. Their positions are dishonest or disingenuous or poorly thought out, but it was also clear to me at this point that if the owners ever got their act together and presented a clear and reasonable vision for the reform of the game, that the players, meaning Fehr and Orza, would still resolutely resist it.”
The union, collectively unconvinced, now stands alone against the sentiment that leadership must do something, against the pressures of Congress, and against certain strains of its membership who want steroids confronted once and for all. The union’s distance from the perceived right side of the argument is no more apparent, and in many ways no more unfortunate, than in the case of Marvin Miller himself. The sage is now eighty-seven years old and possesses every bit of the wit and ferocity of the old days. If anything, he is more forceful in his opinions than the current union leadership, which despite heavy reservations did ultimately compromise with the owners on a new policy.
Miller believes the entire episode to be a media-driven farce. The union, he says, will forever regret bowing to the appearance of public pressure by reopening an existing collective-bargaining agreement. It was unthinkable. He does not believe that Congress is doing anything more than bluffing; it does not have the authority to supersede a labor agreement that was collectively bargained. Miller not only is angered by the precedent, but is not convinced that anabolic substances even help baseball players. At a dinner in Boston, Miller unloads. “If you tell me steroids help you hit major league pitching more often and farther, I see no evidence whatsoever. None,” Miller says. “I think if you tell me that using steroids and bulking up like that will help the performance of a football linebacker, maybe. If you tell me it will help a professional wrestler, maybe. If you tell me it will help a beer hall bouncer, maybe. If you tell me it will help somebody become the governor of California, maybe.
“But hitting major league pitching more often and farther is a far cry. You have to have more evidence than we do. I’m not going to say I know. I don’t know. I’m going to say neither does anyone in this room nor anyone else know. There never has been any kind of decent testing of the same player, for example, with and without steroids, over a stretch of time, so you can judge his performance. None. And until we get some evidence of a concrete nature instead of someone’s opinion, that’s my view.”
Since he entered the game in 1966, Marvin Miller has been the towering union figure, and his legend has only grown larger as time has passed. There is no doubt of this. That does not stop the sage from being ridiculed. For Marvin Miller to be treated so unkindly is stunning. Bob Costas is particularly sharp in his criticism. The game needs action and Miller is being obstructionist. “Listening to Marvin Miller now, Mike Lupica put it well when he said, ‘Marvin Miller, once the greatest labor leader of all, and now just an old crank ...’ That may have seemed harsh, but that’s true,” Costas says. “If he weren’t Marvin Miller, and his name were Marvin Jones, and you took some of the things he’s said in the past few years and considered them on their merits, you’d see they’d have to move up several notches just to qualify as drivel.
“He says there’s no proof that steroids would improve anyone’s performance. Well, then why do these idiot players take them? So they can look good at the beach? Why do Olympic athletes take them? Why is there a direct connection between a leap in all these performances and the obvious change in body types?
“You have Miller saying, ‘Why do all these sportswriters go on and on about steroids when they should be talking about how dangerous cigarettes are?’ He actually said this to Dave Kindred. I was unaware that the sports pages of the New York Times are supposed to take up the same issues that the health and science pages do. This stuff is just nonsense. Dave Kindred wrote, ‘So says Marvin Miller, a wise man.’ And I said to Dave, ‘If Aristotle were reincarnated and you gave him credit for everything he had done, and then Aristotle proclaimed two plus two is five, would you be forced to consider the validity of that statement, just because he was Aristotle?’”
TEN DAYS after the Canseco book is released, Barry Bonds makes his first statements of the spring. He is 11 home runs away from tying Ruth and 53 from passing Aaron. The day before the Canseco book hits the shelves, a woman from Bonds’s past becomes an important part of his future. The sensationalist Fox News Channel television personality Geraldo Rivera interviews Kimberly Bell, a woman who claims to have been Bonds’s mistress for nine years. Bell says their relationship spanned both of Bonds’s marriages, and during the years 1999 and 2000, Bell says, Bonds told her he used anabolic steroids. Bell tells Rivera that Bonds once bought her a house for $207,000 and recently offered her $20,000 to sign a confidentiality agreement. He tried to buy her silence, but Bell was insulted by the dollar amount. She tells Rivera she’s writing a book to get even. Bell says that Bonds told her he began taking steroids in 1999 to recover faster from an injury and that baseball was filled with players taking similar substances. Bell says that Bonds was concerned about the changes taking place with his body, that he was concerned with his heavier frame and increased levels of acne.
Soon Kimberly Bell is testifying to a Federal grand jury with full immunity about her relationship with Barry Bonds. Her testimony is withering. She tells the government that Bonds told her of his anabolic steroid use and that he was only doing what so many other players did. She says that Bonds was convinced his injuries in 1999 and 2000 were caused by steroid use. Bell says she kept ninety minutes of answering-machine recordings from Bonds that will corroborate her story. There is talk that in Bonds’s earlier BALCO testimony are inaccuracies that may lead to a possible perjury charge. Her testimony then takes a potentially disastrous twist, for Kimberly Bell then details how Bonds instructed her to deposit cash payments to her. She testifies that he told her never to exceed $10,000 in any given account, for $10,000 represents a red flag for the IRS. She testifies that by spreading $8,000 of untaxed money—earned from Bonds’s selling
off some of his memorabilia—that Barry Bonds taught her how to avoid the IRS and by extension paying his taxes.
It is against this backdrop that Bonds first sits in front of a microphone at Scottsdale Stadium on February 22 and, in a nationally televised press conference, lunges, attacks, and rails against the press, against the steroid era, and against the world. He is furious, playful with an edgy cynicism, and wholly combative with the press, his eternal tormentors. Barry Bonds on this day is revealing, intimidating, and daring anyone to cross him. He is the Barry Bonds who assaults his questioners, demanding they provide the evidence necessary for his conviction or leave him the hell alone. If he had spent the last eighteen years cultivating his distance, on this day he stands on flat ground, face-to-face with America in all of his rage and complexity. He acknowledges baseball’s attempts to fix itself, but will not say what the sport needed to fix. He wishes baseball would move forward, yet refuses to discuss what it is moving forward from. Selig and Bonds had spoken numerous times during the offseason, from the Chronicle coverage through the Canseco storm, and in serving the commissioner, Bonds had asked that the policy Selig engineered be allowed to work, yet now he grows hostile when pressed about why a policy is necessary. For thirty-one minutes, it is Barry Bonds at his most passionate, most arrogant, and even his most vulnerable. For a few moments, it appears as if Bonds will break and admit to his suspected steroid use. He says that no one wants the game to suffer as it now does and that everyone has made mistakes, as if to acknowledge for the first time that things had gone too far. Moments later, he calls the overflowing press corps liars. For a time, it looks as though Bonds is having some sort of breakdown, controlled, yet finally ready to unburden his soul from its emotional constraints, always tightly held. He parries. Why is baseball so concerned with steroids when it glorifies alcohol and tobacco, the acceptable drugs that accelerated his father’s 2003 death from lung cancer and a brain tumor and challenged his family structure? Where is the fairness in that? He reveals the slights that fuel him, noting that his road has been harder than Ruth’s because “Ruth wasn’t black.” He confronts the moral and business sides of baseball. If the game seeks to use asterisks to mark time, why not use them for all of history? Why not use an asterisk on Ruth for not having to play against black and Latino - people? On this afternoon, Bonds is barely contained. Hypocrisy and inconsistency cannot be selective, he seems to be saying. He would not relent. His choice not to play the hero game is a conscious one. He - doesn’t need you. He never did.
Juicing the Game Page 48